[DISCUSS] Making Atomic the cloud edition

Matt Micene nzwulfin at gmail.com
Fri Aug 21 13:49:18 UTC 2015


Given:

>  jzb
>
Given that a great deal of interesting work is going into the Fedora
> Atomic host, we'd like to make Atomic the main deliverable/focus for the
> Cloud Working Group and Cloud edition.


and

mattdm
>
For that, we need the Cloud Base to have *internal* visibility and
> connections, but it doesn't need to confuse the marketing message.
>

I think moving the focus of Cloud SIG to focus on Atomic would confuse
folks more than the currently slim messaging around the Cloud SIG goals.  I
think CentOS has the right approach with a separate Atomic SIG, and I
propose that we follow that model.  Split Atomic into it's own SIG,
continue the Cloud SIG to focus on cloud things.

Atomic is a new way of doing everything.  OS management changes, package
management changes, Docker + K8S + Nulecule + Atomicapp + ? + ? + ?.  We
are trying to move at a much more rapid pace than the rest of the Fedora
Project products (see the 2 week release proposal).  We are breaking things
at a much more rapid pace than other products as well.  Lots of initial
answers on ask / IRC wind up as, "update the tree see if it's still
broken".

I  don't think that if you say the word "cloud" in a room of IT folks
today, that over 1% are going to think Atomic.  They think OpenStack,
OpenShift, CloudFoundry, Eucalyptus, AWS, ownCloud, etc.  Fedora as
foundation, Fedora as tenant, Fedora as a Service!  The new Cloud SIG draft
reflects those use cases: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud_SIG-new-draft.
Fedora saying "well when *we* say cloud we mean Atomic not what you think"
and having to explain it doesn't sound like a win.

And while there's overlap in uses like cloud-init, Atomic is much more
likely to want a completely new compatible implementation because the
dependency tree makes maintenance more complex than a Fedora OpenStack
guest image will need to care about.  (See my previous rants on sizing ;-)
).  Or a Fedora Server optimized for running nova-compute.  The Cloud Base
Image and the Atomic host or the Docker Base Image don't and shouldn't have
much in common because the use cases are different.

I do think that the Cloud SIG does need better messaging about its intents
and goals.  The new SIG draft looks like a step in the right direction to
me.  Define major focus areas (run IaaS on Fedora, run Fedora in IaaS, etc)
then layer in use cases and projects from the group.

A new Atomic SIG would focus on stabilizing the Atomic host, the delivery
process, and the Docker base image.  Atomic hosts are all about running
Docker workloads, so that makes sense to couple.  As containerization
grows, I could see the need for moving Docker image management somewhere
else.

Did I miss the 72 hr window?

- matt m


On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 08:04:33PM +0530, Lalatendu Mohanty wrote:
> > Does it mean that we are assuming that we have considerable users
> > using current fedora atomic image
> > or considerable users using the cloud image mostly for running
> > containers and going to increase in future ?
> > I understand that Atomic host having newer technology which is
> > better for a world of containers but just want to make sure the
> > decision is driven by user needs.
>
> I'm at LinuxCon, which is also at the same time CloudOpen and
> ContainerCon. The sample size is small and the audience skewed, but:
> I've talked to several (three) people using/testing Fedora Atomic, at
> least one of them fairly seriously; no one using Cloud Base image.
>
> That's not to say that they don't exist (hi there!), but I think user
> interest/excitement around Atomic is clear. Perhaps more crucially as
> we make this plan, I think the people who want basic-Fedora-in-the-cloud
> are less likely to be a "wedge" audience, where we can market that as
> their first exposure to Fedora and from there possibly grow into more
> areas. Rather, they're going to be people who already know Fedora, or
> are already interested in us in general, and then are looking to have
> that in a cloud environment.
>
> For that, we need the Cloud Base to have *internal* visibility and
> connections, but it doesn't need to confuse the marketing message.
> Specifically, I'd like it to go in the "Other Downloads" section of
> <https://getfedora.org/en/cloud/download/>, introduced like this:
>
>
>   "Looking for a plain, non-Atomic image optimized for cloud
>   environments? Download Fedora Cloud Base Image: [...]"
>
>
>
> --
> Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> Fedora Project Leader
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>
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